Making Film History with Text Analytics: Six Countries, Five Languages, and One Fill-in-the-Blank Question!

The U.S. trade deficit may have hit a five-year high in January, but at least one American export remains the undisputed world leader: Hollywood films.

Even with growing competition from China and Bollywood, and in spite of the recent wave of America-bashing that seems to have swept the globe, the appetite for this most American of cultural artifacts is robust as ever.

In fact, the most beloved films of moviegoers in the UK, continental Europe and Japan are overwhelmingly and almost exclusively American, and the top three favorite films of all time among these international audiences collectively are Titanic, Star Wars and Harry Potter (in that order).

We know this not because these films made a killing in theaters, but because for the first time ever we asked people and they told us so!

No other source that I’m aware of has compiled an international list of the most beloved films of all time because the project would’ve been too expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming to be worthwhile.

Global box office has until now been the one and only measure for a film’s popularity internationally, but even adjusted for inflation it isn’t a perfect proxy for the films people cherish.

So, we asked general population samples (n=1,500 per country) in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Japan as well as 3,000 Americans the following:

“What is your favorite movie of all time (name up to three if you can)?”

Stating the obvious (because it’s important): This was not a multiple-choice question. People could have said anything. In fact, on average, close to 200 unique movie titles were mentioned from each country surveyed.

In total, we collected more than 10,500 text comments from six countries spanning five languages, which OdinText analyzed in just over one hour! Ta da!

If you’re not as impressed as I am by this feat, try fielding an international survey with an open-ended question in five languages (including a non-Roman alphabet like Japanese), then translating, coding and analyzing the responses manually.

Machine translation usually works very well with text analysis, though in a few instances may require a little human knowledge/tweaking. For example, the movie “The Green Mile” was renamed “The Green Line” in France (something that can easily be accounted for in OdinText).

As a standard for comparison, I’ve included two lists below of the top-grossing films of all time worldwide. This first list below, sourced from Wikipedia and originally from Guinness World Records, presents the top 10 films adjusted for inflation as of 2014:

This second list at Box Office Mojo is not adjusted for inflation like the Guinness list above, but it’s current and more extensive yet is very different than what we found when people are allowed to tell us their favorite movies.

So, how did people’s responses to our question stack up to global box office figures?

As you can see, the top four highest grossing films (adjusted for inflation) in our first chart—“Gone with the Wind,” “Avatar,” “Star Wars,” and “Titanic”—also appeared in the top 10 favorites, albeit not in the same order. The other six highest grossing films did not even make the top international 25 favorites. Similarly, six of the top 10 international favorites were not among the top 10 highest grossing films.

At the individual country levels you’ll note some differences. The top three favorites were very popular in every country, but some of the internationally highest-grossing films were not. “Avatar,” for example, is well-loved everywhere except in the UK and Japan.

And while it’s perhaps not surprising that “Gone with the Wind” is a favorite among Americans, the fact that it made the top 10 in France was a surprise to me. And GwtW just missed the top 25 for Japan, coming in #26. It’s actually least popular in Germany, coming in #35 there.

Moreover, not a single domestic film appeared in the top 25 favorites for the UK and Spain, respectively. The closest to a domestic film for Spain was “A Monster Comes to See Me,” whose director is Spanish. German audiences only named one German favorite, and even its title contains a misspelled English curseword: “Fack Ju Gothe.”

France and Japan (below) are particularly noteworthy for several reasons. France is renowned for its film making and its cultural pride, yet conspicuously only one French film appeared in the top 10 favorites of French movie watchers.

Japan, which not only has an established domestic film industry but arguably the most pronounced and culture of the countries sampled, differed the most.

Japanese movie watchers bucked the international trend by listing three Japanese films among their top 10 favorites, most conspicuously by naming a non-U.S. film their number one favorite! (The popularity of the film “Your Name” in Japan was even sufficient to propel the title into the aggregated top 10 across countries!)

In addition, animated films like “Your Name” and “My Neighbor Tortoro” figured prominently among Japanese favorites.

Favorites in other countries like “Dirty Dancing” and “Lord of the Rings” weren’t particularly well-liked by the Japanese, whereas surprises like “Resident Evil” and “Roman Holiday” were favorites.

There are a lot of ways to easily slice these data with OdinText. Just for fun, we asked OdinText what the gender split was for the top favorite:

And if there’s such a thing as a “chick flick,” then there’s also a male equivalent. OdinText identified a number of favorites that were only mentioned by men or by women!

Little White Lies, Bridget Jones, Pearl Harbor, Fifty Shades of Gray, and Sweet Home Alabama are among these ‘Chick Flick Only’ movies, whereas The Good The Bad & The Ugly, Transformers, Zulu, Das Boot, and Super Troopers are examples of Guy only flicks.

While we were at it, we asked a separate gen pop sample of Americans (n=1500) to name the worst movie ever made.

Likely due to the proximity to the Oscars when the survey was fielded, the number one was shockingly “La La Land”! In addition, some of the international favorites and highest grossing films globally—notably “Titanic,” “Avatar,” “Jaws,” and “Star Wars”—were also raspberries for a lot of people. Go figure!

So movie fans, I think you’ll agree we squeezed quite a bit out one open-ended question here!

Not only were we able to provide this data for the first time ever, but we managed to collect, translate and analyze the data quickly, easily and affordably.

That’s six countries, five languages, one open-ended question. And it’s no Hollywood fairytale.

Although we used a direct response instrument to collect the data here, I’d like to point out that OdinText might have been able to do a similar analysis without a survey. For example, in our recent “Showhole” post, OdinText predicted what television shows people would like based on thousands of comments scraped from the Internet.

14 thoughts on “Making Film History with Text Analytics: Six Countries, Five Languages, and One Fill-in-the-Blank Question!”

PS. On a personal note I just had to watch the only non-US movie in a number one slot, so I Just finished watching ‘Your Name’

In the first 10-15 minutes, I thought it was awkward and boring, I wouldn’t have considered it a good movie never mind a “Best Ever”.

But by the end, it gets a lot deeper than the initial description I saw for the movie on the web.

It’s about the intersection of time and space, and humanity, and also love to a lesser extent. Very interesting, definitely worth watching and a lot more meaningful than Titanic.

Though Titanic ironically shares some of those features if you think about it, though less explicitly.

Titanic is about an event in history that we are all familiar with. It’s Iconic, something the whole world is familiar with. It is both a time and a place, related to a disaster of course.

Then in that time and place, you had two individuals, each on their own path through time and space, which for a moment, for a couple of days, intersect because they are both on the titanic.

One of them, the girl is from a high-class family with money. The young man is low class, won the ticket in a poker game and has his cabin on the lower-class deck.

But for chance, in one moment, these different lines through time, space and economic/class differences intersect for these two young people and they meet and realize they are ‘soul mates’. This time is very short, and then disaster hits and that intersection of time and space when they met becomes all the more unique.

That is the beauty of Titanic if you think about it, which we forget after watching it, but that is the real magic behind that movie. Not the money spent on it, nor the actors.

The Japanese movie does exactly this without Leonardo DiCaprio, without millions, in a cartoon form, and with less distraction makes you think about the peculiarness of life, how we are all just casualties at the will of the gods or fate, and that life is just that a random intersection of time and space, and whomever else we cross in that short intersection and what happens which may or more likely may not be within our control is the great tragedy, but also the great beauty of life which we must cherish and find meaning in.

Interesting, how watching ‘Your Name’ made me think of Titanic, a movie I never think of and certainly would not have ranked in my own top, but appreciate it more, and understand it better.

Check out ‘Your Name’ and you’ll see what I mean.

Have a few more international flicks to go through. Wish there were more though…. ☹

@Melissa OdinText is more frequently used with more complex comments. Machine translation is very good these days, you don’t lose much nuance at all, and that which is lost is usually irrelevant at the aggregate level. Probably next week I’ll post another multi national case study with even more languages/countries on a more robust/standard free form comment. [Also happy to give you a personal demo with data in any languages if you like]

Recent Comments

Kevin I wonder how the results might have been different if respondents knew that government employees are unionized at a rate 5 times higher than private... – Sep 05, 1:31 PM

Scott Upham Several main themes can be derived from this analysis - 40% are generally positive perhaps by association with people they know - factory workers, teachers,... – Sep 03, 8:09 PM

Scott Shemwell the “W” word is important. The statement, “shrank by half when respondents were asked to provide a reason for their opinion,” is key. Seems like... – Aug 28, 3:21 PM

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